South Africa’s higher education and skills development sector has become the site of a ferocious political struggle, not between reformers and reactionaries in the abstract, but between those attempting to salvage public institutions and those who have grown fat from hollowing them out.
At the centre of this battle stands higher education minister Buti Manamela, now the target of what appears to be a coordinated and increasingly desperate campaign of vilification.
The attacks did not emerge in a vacuum. They intensified when Manamela took the extraordinary but necessary decision to place several dysfunctional Sector Education and Training Authorities (Setas) under administration.
For years, these institutions, originally conceived as engines of skills development for the largely unemployed black youth, have been degraded into feeding troughs for politically connected networks. Boards and executives, entrusted with public resources intended to uplift millions of poor young South Africans, instead transformed Setas into sophisticated patronage machines.
The rot was not merely administrative incompetence. It was culture of organised looting.
The scandal lies not only in the theft itself, but in the brazenness with which it has been defended. Dissolved boards, enriched through years of institutional decay, marched into our judicial system to challenge their removal as though accountability itself were an injustice. That they did so with such confidence reveals the extent to which the culture of impunity has become normalised in parts of our public life and institutions. Fortunately, the courts saw through the charade and affirmed the minister’s interventions.
But the networks feeding off the carcass of our education and skills sector, and future of our children, were never going to retreat quietly.
The latest battleground is the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS), perhaps one of the most critical democratic instruments established in post-apartheid South Africa. NSFAS exists because this country once made a solemn promise that no academically deserving young person should be denied higher education because of poverty. It is not simply an institution, it is a social covenant between the democratic state and the black poor and working class.
And yet NSFAS too has become infected by governance failures so severe that intervention became unavoidable. Hundreds of millions of rand are lost annually to ghost students as confirmed by two audit firms. Procurement scandals. Service-provider cartels operating through revolving doors between the institution and private contractors. Payment failures leaving vulnerable students stranded and humiliated. Audit crises. Administrative paralysis.
Against this backdrop, minister Manamela’s decision to place NSFAS under administration was not radical. It was overdue.
Predictably, the same script followed. Dissolved board members rushed to court, cloaking self-preservation in the language of constitutional grievance. Unable to defend the indefensible, they have resorted instead to insinuation and character assassination.
The most cynical allegation, that the minister summoned board members he intended to dissolve to secret meetings and instructed them to switch off their phones, is politically elegant precisely because it is impossible to conclusively prove or disprove. It is the kind of allegation crafted not for truth, but for contamination.
Its objective is obvious. It is meant to poison public perception and manufacture enough political smoke to force presidential intervention.
But there is a problem for the conspirators. Manamela’s public record exists. It is long, visible and remarkably clean. Even his detractors, for all their fury and cynicism, stop short of accusing him of corruption because they know they possess no evidence.
In an era where scandal follows ministers with exhausting regularity, Manamela’s enduring reputation for integrity is not incidental, it is precisely what makes him dangerous to entrenched corrupt patronage networks.
What is perhaps most disturbing is the growing evidence that elements within parliament itself have aligned with these networks. Members of portfolio committees, constitutionally mandated to oversee the executive and safeguard public accountability, are increasingly functioning less like watchdogs and more like political brokers within an extortion economy. This represents a profound corruption not merely of individuals, but of democratic oversight itself.
South Africa has witnessed this pattern before. Institutions are weakened deliberately, governance collapses, politically connected intermediaries move in, and any attempt at reform is met with orchestrated outrage disguised as democratic concern. The language of accountability is weaponised to protect the enemies of accountability.
For what we are witnessing is not merely an attack on an individual minister. It is resistance against any effort to reclaim the higher education and skills sector from organised predation. Manamela is overturning the tables of the money changers in the temple of higher education, and predictably, the merchants are enraged.
This is why the battle over Setas and NSFAS matters beyond bureaucratic procedure. It concerns whether public institutions will serve their constitutional purpose or remain captive to parasitic and destructive scoundrels who enrich themselves while millions of unemployed young people sink deeper into despair.
Many of us remember the era of Tefsa (Tertiary Education Fund of South Africa), NSFAS’s predecessor. We understand intimately what student financial aid has meant for generations of black professionals, intellectuals, teachers, engineers, nurses and public servants who would otherwise have been excluded from higher education.
We also remember Manamela not as a minister ensconced in ministerial comfort, but as a student activist and leader of the South African College Students Union, forged in the struggles for transformation within universities and colleges themselves.
His politics were not manufactured in boardrooms. They emerged from the lived realities of exclusion, despair, inequality and the urgent necessity of educational transformation.
That history matters now.
For what we are witnessing is not merely an attack on an individual minister. It is resistance against any effort to reclaim the higher education and skills sector from organised predation. Manamela is overturning the tables of the money changers in the temple of higher education, and predictably, the merchants are enraged.
The stakes are immense. If the reformers fail, poor black students will continue paying the price while politically connected rent seekers feast on institutions built in their name. If the looters prevail, South Africa’s already fragile social compact will deteriorate even further.
The wolves circling minister Manamela understand exactly what is at risk. So should the rest of us.
And those of us who still believe public institutions must serve the people rather than syndicates have a responsibility to say clearly that the campaign to destroy him will not proceed uncontested.
• Andile Lungisa is a member of the ANC NEC and former ANCYL deputy president
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